Stretch, grab a late afternoon cup of caffeine and get
caught up on the most important news of the day
with our Coffee Break newsletter. These are the stories
that will fill you in on the world that's spinning outside
of your office window - at the moment that you get a
chance to take a breath.

The University Is Ripe for Replacement

"Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down." -- Stalin, interview with H.G. Wells

Beginning in early K-12 and continuing to the highest levels of university education, Leftist indoctrination is the gravest dilemma that afflicts education in North America, rendering it perhaps the most powerful instrument of anti-Western bias and socialist propaganda of the modern era.

Here my concern is with the abandonment of genuine scholarship, fact-based historical research, familiarity with the “Great Books” and the development of critical thinking habits, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. The curriculum now in place is one of intellectual dysphoria promoting the circulation of false or unprovable narratives -- anthropogenic global warming, Islam as a religion of peace, the campus rape epidemic, toxic masculinity, the scandal of American history, the glories of “diversity and inclusion,” the benefits of socialism, to cite just a few among a veritable encyclopedia -- and furthering the revolutionary project of social and political deconstruction. Education has been transformed into a grooming operation for social justice warriors, radical feminists, anti-white vigilantes and budding socialists.

Moreover, to compound the septic plunge into calamitous absurdity, the self-contradictory adoption as a kind of state religion of postmodern thought and doctrine -- briefly, the suspicion of reason, the belief that reality is a conceptual construct, the rejection of fixed or objective truth -- has served to turn the university into a parody of its original purpose, the pursuit of genuine knowledge.

Defenders of the status quo need to be taken not with a grain of salt but an entire salt mine. Case in point: Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders, a rabid anti-conservative, an apologist for Islam, a believer in rampant immigration, and one of the shoddiest journalists in Canada, fully rejects the charge of university malfeasance. Rather, he claims, the campus is “less radical, more tolerant, more open and more politically moderate than ever before.”

The fantasy bubble that bullhorns like Saunders inhabit seems pretty well impermeable. You cannot reason with people who are immune to facts or, for whatever reason, consider countervailing evidence an offense against subjective conviction. They are either useful idiots or handy liars. Better to attend to an acclaimed historian like Niall Ferguson who, in an interview on Dave Rubin's show, pointed out that since the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the Left has been busy replicating itself in the universities via targeted recruiting, to the extent that today “90% plus of faculty members are liberals or progressivists, if not outright Marxists.”

As H.G Wells said in a fawning 1934 interview with Josef Stalin, “There can be no revolution without a radical change in the educational system.” To which Stalin replied, “That is a correct observation.” The “radical change,” of course, is socialism, which a craven administration and a squalid faculty are assiduously promoting.